RESUMO
Demand response (DR) has been studied widely in the smart grid literature, however, there is still a significant gap in approaches that address security, privacy, and robustness of settlement processes simultaneously. The need for security and robustness emerges as a vital property, as Internet of Things (IoT) devices become part of the smart grid; in the form of smart meters, home energy management systems (HEMSs), intelligent transformers, and so on. In this paper, we use energy blockchain to secure energy transactions among customers and the utility. In addition, we formulate a mixed-strategy stochastic game model to address uncertainties in DR contributions of agents and achieve optimal demand response decisions. This model utilizes the processing hardware of customers for block mining, stores customer DR agreements as distributed ledgers, and offers a smart contract and consensus algorithm for energy transaction validation. We use a real dataset of residential demand profiles and photovoltaic (PV) generation to validate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results show the impact of electric vehicle (EV) discharging and customer demand reduction on increasing the probability of successful block mining and improving customer profits. Moreover, the results demonstrate the security and robustness of our consensus algorithm for detecting malicious activities.
RESUMO
The astounding growth of the Internet has generated digital asset extensively. Users are concerned about asset management so that the asset can be conveyed successfully to the descendent posthumously. Very few works have addressed designing and modeling of digital asset inheritance (DAI) from a technical design perspective. They have several inherent limitations such as incorrect death confirmation, high participation of nominee, the possibility of failure to obtain recovery key, and are based on many unreasonable assumptions, thus inefficient to design in the real life. In this paper, we have formalized the different categories of digital assets and defined the various security goals, required functionalities, and necessary entities to build an asset inheritance model. We have also proposed a new protocol named digital asset inheritance protocol (DAIP) using certificateless encryption (CLE) and identity-based system (IBS) to convey the user's online persona efficiently to the descendent after his death. DAIP allows the nominee to successfully retrieve the asset after the user's demise, even if a nominee is uninformed regarding the asset. We, then, provide rigorous security proofs of various properties using real-ideal worlds paradigm. Finally, we have implemented DAIP model using PBC and pycryptodome library. The simulation results affirm that it can be practically efficient to implement.
RESUMO
The infection rate of COVID-19 and the rapid mutation ability of the virus has forced governments and health authorities to adopt lockdowns, increased testing, and contact tracing to reduce the virus's spread. Digital contact tracing has become a supplement to the traditional manual contact tracing process. However, although several digital contact tracing apps are proposed and deployed, these have not been widely adopted due to apprehensions surrounding privacy and security. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol,"Did I Meet You" (DIMY). The protocol provides full-lifecycle data privacy protection on the devices as well as the back-end servers to address most of the privacy concerns associated with existing protocols. We have employed Bloom filters to provide efficient privacy-preserving storage and have used the Diffie-Hellman key exchange for secret sharing among the participants. We show that DIMY provides resilience against many well-known attacks while introducing negligible overheads. DIMY's footprint on the storage space of clients' devices and back-end servers is also significantly lower than other similar state-of-the-art apps.